A familiar and aggravating problem with many conventional tires occurs when tires go flat. A common tire design utilizes air pressure to pressurize the tire or a tube within the tire. Though this design provides substantial ride cushioning and can carry a wide range of loads, a significant drawback is the risk of the tire going flat from air leakage, puncture of the tire or tube, or any other cause resulting in the escape of pressurized air within the tire or tube.
In an effort to address this problem, alternative tire designs have been developed which do not use pressurized air. To obtain ride cushioning and adequate load carrying capacity, these other designs rely upon the structure of the tire and/or rim upon which the tire is mounted and the features of the materials forming such structure.
A solid tire effectively eliminates the risk of a flat. However, a solid tire is unacceptably heavy and requires a substantially greater amount of material to make than a hollow tire, and is thus unacceptably expensive and often does not provide a cushioned ride. Therefore, a number of designs for nondeflatable tires employ a hollow structure which attempts to achieve high load-carrying capacities while still providing a cushioned ride. Examples of such tire designs are disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 5,551,763 to Alsman, U.S. Pat. No. 1,438,604 to McClure, and U.S. Pat. No. 4,493,355 to Ippen et al.
Another problem often arising in conventional tire designs is the difficulty inherent in mounting the tire on a rim. It is obviously desirable for a tire to be securely mounted on a rim for safe operation of the tire. However, the very design employed to secure the tire on the rim often creates substantial difficulty in the assembly and disassembly of the tire and rim. Conventional non-deflatable tires (such as those described in the U.S. patents mentioned above) do not offer a design where the tire may be easily mounted on or removed from a rim.
Therefore, a need exists for a non-deflatable tire which can carry substantial loads while still providing a cushioned ride, which can be easily mounted and demounted from a rim, and which uses as little material as possible to minimize the weight of the tire and to save on the material costs. The invention as described herein provides such a tire.